The Bells of Hell

by Michael Kurland

‘Yes, that. If he were to declare war on the United States, I would move to Brooklyn.’

  She bent over to kiss him on the forehead and then walked across the deep carpet to the bathroom; he watched with renewed interest the way her thighs kissed briefly with each step. She turned to smile at him, as though she knew just what he had been thinking, before closing the bathroom door. Fifteen minutes later she opened the door and emerged in a puff of steam, one towel wrapped around the more interesting parts of her body while with another she was energetically pummeling her hair. ‘Your turn,’ she said, padding back to the bed.

  He leaped to his feet and strode across the carpet, chest out, she noted with silent amusement, and stomach sucked in. After he had disappeared into the bathroom she quickly slid into her most intimate layers of clothing and then found her red handbag by the side of the bed and pulled out a gold lipstick case and matching compact.

  The large dresser between the two windows on the far wall supported an oversized mirror. She danced over to it, turned on the table lamp, and began applying powder to various parts of her anatomy.

  She paused when she heard the shower go on in the bathroom, took a deep breath, and set the compact carefully down on a bare spot on the dresser. Inserting the tip of a hairpin into a tiny hole next to the hinge on the compact, she pushed it in until she heard the merest suggestion of a click. Then, using both hands, she gave the base of the compact a little twist that split it in two. The bottom half held a shallow depression filled with a specially compounded dense wax smoothed to a perfectly flat surface. From the towel that enfolded her hair she removed a small, oddly shaped key on a thin gold chain. Holding her breath to add that extra bit of steadiness to her hand, she pressed the key firmly into the wax, first one side and then the other. She then carefully closed the hidden cavity in the compact and wiped any hint of wax off the key before going back to the bed and sliding the key in between the rumpled sheets. Pausing for a second to listen to the reassuring patter of the shower, she returned to her spot and stared at herself critically in the mirror before picking up the lipstick case.

  It was two minutes later when Marcello burst suddenly back into the bedroom, dripping wet, the shower still going behind him. ‘La mia chiave!’ he yelled. ‘My key! Where is my key?’

  She turned to look at him, lipstick poised in the air. ‘Calm down,’ she advised. ‘What are you talking about? What key?’

  ‘That key which I have around my neck.’

  ‘You don’t have a key around your neck,’ she observed. ‘Oh, wait – you mean that thing that was on the gold chain? That was a key?’

  He lifted the blanket and shook two pillows out before throwing them on the floor, and then turned to glare at her. ‘Yes, my little poppet, that was a key. What did you think it was?’

  ‘I don’t know. It didn’t look much like a key. Some sort of talisman, perhaps. Something Italian.’ She closed the lipstick and put it and the compact back in her purse.

  ‘It is a key,’ Marcello assured her. ‘I have the care of it for my friend while he is in Rome, and if it is not found it is a problem molto grave for me. I will be – how you say? – dismembered.’

  She looked startled. ‘I don’t think that’s what we say,’ she said. ‘Unless your Fascist bosses are even more bloodthirsty than I imagined. So,’ she looked around, ‘what did you do with it?’

  ‘Me?’ He glared at her. ‘I have done nothing with it. And yet it is missing.’

  ‘Well!’ She glared back. ‘Don’t look at me. It was around your neck. I remember because it kept hitting me in the nose when you, ah, moved.’

  ‘Ah, yes. And just when, do you recall, did it stop this hitting you?’

  ‘When you fell off me like a beached herring. You grunted something in, I suppose, Italian and rolled over.’

  ‘And the key then came off my neck?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it stopped hitting my nose.’

  ‘Then perhaps …’ He stripped off the blanket and then the top sheet and something that flashed gold went with the sheet onto the floor. ‘Aha!’ he said, and pounced on it like a spaniel retrieving a tennis ball.

  ‘Your key?’ she asked sweetly.

  FIVE

  The City is of Night; perchance of Death

  But certainly of Night …

  – James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night

  ‘Naked?’

  ‘Naked. The guy was tied to a chair, beaten bloody, and stripped naked. Probably after he died – the naked part, that is.’

  The 84th Precinct squad room had that faint smell of disinfectant, dried vomit, and stale cigarette smoke that haunts precinct houses, that seemed to have worked its way through the paint into the walls, never to leave until some distant time when the building was disassembled into its component parts. Detective First Grade Max Covitt imagined that he could also sense the cumulative man-years of fear and despair that had worked themselves as a sort of psychic burden into the fabric of the building. He didn’t much believe in psychic burdens or psychic anything else, but nonetheless …

  The three two-man teams of Brooklyn Homicide occupied five desks in a corner of the room next to the lieutenant’s office. Detective Covitt’s desk in the coveted spot by the window had been old when Teddy Roosevelt was Superintendent of Police forty years before and was still considered ‘serviceable’ by the department.

  Covitt’s swivel chair, almost as old as the desk, creaked in alarm as he leaned his two hundred pounds back and put his feet up on the pull-out stand that had once held a typewriter. ‘My question for you is,’ he said, looking up at the tall man in the dark brown fedora and light brown trench coat standing across the desk from him, ‘what’s Washington’s interest in this here routine, if particularly nasty, killing? Not that I’m complaining, you understand, but the way I been told is that the FBI got no interest in local murders.’

  ‘And, although you hate to mention it, no jurisdiction.’

  ‘Yeah, well, and that.’

  ‘Actually,’ the man said, settling into the visitor’s chair, ‘I’m not FBI. And, technically, I’m not Washington. We have an office in the old Custom House in Manhattan.’

  Covitt blew air from between his closed lips. ‘The Lieutenant said you was FBI.’

  ‘A misunderstanding.’ The man took the leather folder holding his ID card out and passed it to Covitt. ‘I’m with OSI, work out of the State Department.’

  Covitt held the card in one hand and peered down at it while he scratched the bridge of his nose thoughtfully with the other. ‘OSI?’

  ‘That’s right. The Office of Special Intelligence.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Me, as it happens. And about six other guys right now. Although we hope to reach an even dozen agents by the end of the year.’ He stuck out his hand. ‘Jacob Welker,’ he said. ‘Special Agent, OSI.’

  ‘Max Covitt,’ Covitt said, taking the hand. ‘Detective First, NYPD, Brooklyn Homicide. What makes you Special?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘As in “Special Agent”?’

  Welker shrugged. ‘I got no idea. Hoover started it. Haven’t you noticed that all his agents are “special”?’

  ‘Yeah. I wondered about that. Is why I’m asking you.’

  ‘We’re just copying Hoover.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Why I’m here,’ Welker said, ‘is because your witness said the magic word.’

  Covitt allowed himself to look puzzled. ‘He didn’t say much,’ he said. ‘Just how he saw four guys beating up on some other guy until they killed him. He spent most of the time hiding in the corner with his head down. Not that I wouldn’t have done the same.’

  ‘And then the attackers took away two steamer trunks and all the guy’s clothing. Just your normal … what exactly?’

  ‘Yeah, we wondered about that. They didn’t want us to figure out who he was, maybe. If Blake wasn’t hiding in the corner we might never figure it out. Even with what he saw
, it’s going to be tough. I figure knowing the murdered guy had two trunks may give us a shot. And, oh yeah, Blake says he thinks the guys were speaking German.’

  ‘That’s the magic word that got me over here,’ Welker said. ‘German. That and naked. What was the point of taking the guy’s clothes off unless they were afraid we could learn something from them?’

  ‘You mean, like where he was from?’

  ‘Like that,’ Welker agreed.

  Covitt took his feet off the stand and planted them on the floor. ‘You think they’re German Germans? Like from Germany? I mean we got a lot of Germans living right here and they ain’t all of them all the time peaceable.’

  ‘True. But the steamer trunks kind of give you the idea that the vic was coming from somewhere. And the vic said, according to your guy, he thought the perps were Gestapo. We don’t have a home-grown Gestapo over here. At least not in Brooklyn.’

  ‘Maybe he was just being, you know, hyper-something. Maybe he didn’t mean the real Gestapo.’

  ‘Could be. But Hoover’s boys lost a German yesterday. They were trying to pick him up off a ship that just came in from Hamburg, but another couple of guys got there first.’

  ‘Ah,’ Covitt said like it was all making sense now. ‘A spy maybe?’

  ‘Maybe. The Bureau got word that an agent was due to land, and they think this was him. They lost interest when he disappeared, figured his friends got to him first and they’d catch up to him further down the line. But then I heard about the corpse, and the magic word German, so I came to check it out.’

  ‘A Nazi?’

  ‘No. Hoover’s not all that excited by Nazis. A Comintern agent.’

  ‘A Commie?’ Covitt shook his head. ‘Who would’a thought? Hoover sure does hate Commies. But then how come he was German?’

  ‘Well, they’re not going to send a Russian. Not unless he’s under deep cover. And to Stalin I guess these Germans are expendable. They’re low-level nuisances while the real spying is done by professionals.’

  ‘So he was nabbed by other Germans?’

  ‘Looks like. The question is who and why. That’s why I want to talk to your witness, and try to recover the steamer trunks and the vic’s clothing.

  Covitt grunted. ‘They’re probably in the East River.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. If you throw the trunks into the river they’re liable to bob up at an inconvenient time. Whereas if you distribute the clothing – we’ll assume for now that they contained clothing and other personal crap – to, say, the Salvation Army, the Destitute Seamen’s Home, and a couple of other worthy charities, they blend in and quickly disappear. The trunks themselves can likewise be disposed of thusly.’

  ‘Or even dumped into the East River.’

  ‘Or even,’ Welker agreed.

  Covitt stared at Welker for a moment and then sighed. ‘Salvation Army, eh? It’s an idea. I’ll put a man on it. What do you think, German labels in the clothes, dropped off in the past two or three days, um, maybe a nice German leather dopp kit. Anything else?

  Welker shrugged. ‘The clothing neatly folded and creased, as though they had just come out of a trunk after a long sea voyage, maybe. And, come to think of it, the labels are probably ripped out. Makes the stuff harder to identify, just in case.’

  Covitt nodded, thought for a moment, and then called across the room: ‘Weintz, I got something for you!’

  A large man with a receding hairline and a protruding belly shambled over to the desk. ‘I hope it’ll wait till after lunch,’ he said. ‘I just sent down for a pastrami and mashed.’

  ‘Mashed?’

  ‘Yeah. I got a thing for Bernstein’s mashed. They do ’em with little bits of fried onion.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, enjoy. And after I want you should wander around to the thrift stores and second-hand clothing joints and like that.’

  ‘Yeah? For what?’

  Covet waved a hand at Welker. ‘You tell him,’ he said.

  Welker explained his idea to the big detective, who nodded, took a few notes, nodded again, and went back to his desk and his pastrami.

  ‘Good man, Weintz,’ Covet said.

  ‘Now,’ Welker said. ‘You know how I can get in touch with what’s-his-name – Blake?’

  ‘We got ’im,’ Covitt told him.

  ‘You’re holding him?’ Welker asked, sounding surprised.

  ‘No, no. But he didn’t have no place to go. Wouldn’t go back to that warehouse, and who could blame him? And he’s got no money, and I figured we might want him again. So we sprung for a room. We put him up at the Elderts on Myrtle Avenue.’

  ‘Can I go see him?’

  ‘Sure. It’s like five blocks from here. I’ll walk you.’

  SIX

  Would you that spangle of Existence spend

  About the Secret – Quick about it, Friend!

  A Hair perhaps divides the False and True –

  And upon what, prithee, may life depend?

  – Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

  If you had strolled down Greene Street just north of Canal in Manhattan in the late 1930s you might have noticed the little shop four doors in from the corner, but your passing glance would have shown that it held nothing of interest, and you would certainly have moved on. The small display window might have held your attention for a second. Artfully covered by a thin layer of dust, it held two nondescript brass clocks of uncertain vintage, one facing forward and the other canted sideways as though it were trying to see what was going on down the block. But they were not worthy of note, and so you probably would not have noted them. A small unpolished brass plate by the side of the door said Isaac Luthier – By Appointment. The door was always locked and ringing the bell would produce no result. Unless, that is, you knew just how it should be rung.

  It was three in the afternoon on Friday when Patricia exited her cab at the corner of Canal and Sixth Avenue and walked the three blocks to Greene. She turned the corner and stood in a doorway for three minutes to make sure no one was following her before going on to Isaac Luthier’s door. After one last look around she gave the ring: three, three, one, two, and waited to be inspected. There was no visible spy-hole or bit of two-way mirror or lens that she could find, and yet Luthier invariably began his usual greeting, ‘Ah, Lady Patricia, how good of you to come,’ before the door was open wide enough for him to see who it was.

  Isaac Luthier, known as ‘The Professor’ to his associates, was a little man with thinning hair, a carefully trimmed goatee, prominent ears, and a notable nose. His glasses were large with thick lenses. When he worked at the neatly cluttered workbench that took up a corner of his shop he clipped a second pair of lenses over the glasses so he could peer down at his work surface and see every dust mite between each grain of wood, or so Patricia imagined as she watched him.

  Luthier was a true artist at what he did, which was to facilitate the removal of objects and documents from their secure locations against the wishes of the owner or, occasionally, permit the inspection of said documents without the owner’s knowledge. He could teach a client several methods of removing letters from envelopes and then reinserting them without disturbing the seal. He had a mastery of the opening and closing of safes without leaving a trace of the transaction. This also required, of course, a complete understanding of door and window locks, burglar alarms, and concealed security devices, as well as the inner workings of safe and vault combination locks and time locks, both electrical and mechanical. But how to tell whether the householder was away for the evening or had just stepped out to get a pack of cigarettes; whether it was better to put a few drops of the blue liquid in the whiskey or the milk to assure that the servant would sleep through the night; whether the doorman could be approached with a proposition that he could most assuredly never tell anyone he had accepted – it was his unerring nose for such details that made him the artist. To sit at his feet while he explained such things was to receive a master course in a truly arcan
e craft.

  ‘I need a key made,’ Patricia said, handing Luthier her gold compact. ‘And I have to be on the train back to Washington tonight.’

  He turned it over in his hands and held it up to the light. ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Turn of the century. Paris? Yes, I think Paris. Matais et Fils, perhaps. Certainly influenced by Lalique.’

  ‘The secret compartment opens …’ Patricia began.

  ‘No – let me,’ he said.

  He turned it over and back several times, flipped open the lid and closed it again, and then peered down at the hinge. ‘Aha!’ Reaching behind him he took the smallest screwdriver Patricia had ever seen and pushed the tip cautiously into the tiny hole by the hinge. When he felt the slight click he removed the screwdriver, put the compact between his palms, and gently twisted. ‘If you use too much pressure it binds, if I am not mistaken,’ he said. ‘Whether deliberately as a security precaution or by a chance of the design I do not know.’

  The two halves separated and he laid them on the table in front of him.

  ‘So,’ he said, looking at the impression of a key, pressed front and back into the smooth wax surface. ‘What sort of wax?’

  ‘A mixture of sixty percent beeswax and forty percent paraffin, I believe,’ Patricia told him.

  ‘Good, good.’ He adjusted the two lamps so the reflections off the surface would be just so, and peered closely at the impressions. ‘Hm,’ he said. He readjusted the lights. ‘This was on a chain,’ he said, ‘I can see the impression.’

  ‘It was,’ she agreed. ‘I removed it while the wearer was, er, otherwise occupied.’

  He looked up at her. ‘Clever,’ he said.

  ‘Misdirection,’ she told him. ‘I was a magician’s assistant as a wee child. I picked up several useful skills.’

  ‘Ah!’ He peered back down at the impressions. ‘A Rabson Two Thousand – wait – no, no …’ He took out a pair of calipers and measured something on one of the impressions then checked them against a steel ruler. ‘No, this key’s from a Twenty-Oh-Seven, if I am not mistaken.’ He turned the compact around, readjusted the lights, and peered down again. Then he went over to his desk and riffled through some mimeographed pages until he found the one he wanted. He ran his finger down a column of numbers. ‘Yes,’ he said, looking up. ‘A Twenty-Oh-Seven. Interesting.’